Uncle Sam Makes You Forget
Even if you go for a mitzvah; you go to a bar mitzvah or a chasunah, same thing. Any place where there is a chaburah of people – even good people – you have to know you're losing yiras Shamayim. Unless, of course, the subject that's being discussed is yiras Shamayim; if you're together with chachamim who are reminding you that’s something else. But otherwise it's “Uncle Sam said this” and “Aunt Fanny said this” and he did this and she did that, and your mind becomes all cluttered.
Not only speaking; just being around people is already a problem because people have a magnetic influence on you. The face of a human being, the personality that plays out on the screen of his or her face, is the most engaging phenomena in the universe.
And therefore when you’re among people then you’re almost guaranteed that there's nobody else except them; in your mind it’s the relatives and the neighbors, the foreman and the boss and the customers and the co-workers. That's all there is in the world and Hakadosh Baruch Hu is expelled from your heart. Solitude, on the other hand, even without any external stimulus, is an opportunity for the natural feeling, the natural awareness to assert itself. Naturally you come to feel the Presence of the Borei.
